How AlphaZero Wins

So far I have looked at three games from the AlphaZero-Stockfish match: #5, #9, and #10 from the ten games provided in the arXiv preprint. All three are amazingly similar, and at the same time they are amazingly unlike almost any other game I’ve ever seen. In...

My Shortest Loss

A few years ago I wrote a post about a game where my opponent resigned in a drawn position. I mean really, truly drawn: I had just sacrificed a queen to force a perpetual check, but he somehow misread it and thought it was a checkmate. Of course, there have been even...

What Would Daisy Do?

Recently I had a kibitzer for one of my chess games against the computer. As we all know, man versus computer is an uneven battle. But a little bit of canine assistance can even up the odds! Daisy and Dana — Shredder (2220) 1. e4 Nf6 2. e5 Nd5 d4 3. d4 d6 4. f4...

Human’s Revenge

In my last post I showed you a game where the computer completely embarrassed me, by playing as if it were the reincarnation of Aron Nimzovich. Of course, after that game I had to get my revenge, and there is no better way to get revenge against a computer than to...

Another Rip Van Winkle Story

In 2014, GM James Tarjan returned to tournament chess after an absence of three decades, and I wrote a post about him called Rip Van Winkle Returns. Last week a friend’s Facebook post reminded me of another, less well-known “Rip Van Winkle” chess...